This is really cool. Great job. Don't stop with this.

Regards,

Eneas

This is really impressive. Was it made with what? perl?

Have you tried to apply this search to other things than book covers only? Like faces, animals, etc…

I was planning, some days ago, to make an app to search images through the web by an example image and thinking of do this using neural nets, but never go on coding… But your app could, maybe, does it much better.

Please, contact me.

The match for Beginning Perl is brilliant - have you considered jacking in this web stuff in favour of a career as an MS Paintbrush artist? :)

I did mean to add an update to this post…

Moving to 16×16 seemed to make the matching worse, as the likelihood of a book cover matching the original image decreased — so, using 8×8 actually made for better matches!

There must be an optimum size that has just the right about of "vagueness" to give good matches, so I'll keep on experimenting.

In terms of adding this into the OPAC, I did think it would be possible to analyse the book covers to get the average colour and then maybe that could be added to the MARC record (so it could become a searchable index)?

If you didn't want hex colour codes in the MARC reccord, you could map the colour to the nearest web colour name. That way, you'd be able to run a keyword search and then limit the results to just "lightsalmon" coloured books :-D

I was fascinated by Dave Pattern's work on searching for books by the colour of their covers and his subsequent searches using images to find similar looking books. I think this stuff is really cool and am impressed with the way he went about app…

I've started reindexing the book covers using a 16×16 image, although I know it will make the search run considerably slower.

It should definitely improve the matching — here's how Mr Stephens looks at 8×8 and 16×16:

The 16×16 is almost recognisable… kind of like looking at Michael through the bottom of a Coke bottle whilst squinting hard!

(heh — wouldn't it be cool if, when Michael gave his next presentation, it was to a room full of librarians looking at him through Coke bottles whilst squinting!)

c.